Longing Read Free Page A

differently from most babies into the world, he was sitting in his study humming some Scottish tunes by François Boïeldieu as he put the finishing touches on his translation of Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel , which he trusted would right the wrong done by Scott himself when he so mangled his English translation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen . Hanging in those few spaces where the thousands of books opened their teeth to the walls were several of Alexander Tibrich’s bucolic Saxon landscapes and a small but uncharacteristically violent painting (some years later to be of conventional prurient interest to the young Robert Schumann) by Januarius Zick of the murder of the men of Lemnos by the wives with whom they had refused to mate because, the men said, the women smelled bad.
    â€œHerr Schumann, Herr Schumann, come!” cried the doctor’s assistant.
    He leapt from his seat and spilled tobacco embers on his pants, which he brushed off and crushed into the Turkish rug—the same country of origin as his splendid weed—with his shoes. “What is it?” he called.
    â€œIt’s Napoleon!” cried the doctor’s assistant.
    â€œI meant, is it a boy or a girl?”
    â€œNapoleon is male,” he was informed.
    By the time Robert was actually born, The Lay of the Last Minstrel was completed and August Schumann had succeeded in burning a hole in the crotch of his gabardines.
    There had once been ten thousand people living in Zwickau. But by the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which virtually coincided with the end of the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire, * there were half that number. A century later—the century that Friedrich Schiller said went out with a storm so that the air might be cleared for the new century to be opened with murder—the population was further shrunk when Napoleon (now barely whispering Leporello’s lugubrious “Tra fume e foco” from Don Giovanni ) and his troops returned. Defeated, diseased, and, because they had destroyed through the weight and drag of their caravan the alluvially fertile soil, famished, they subsisted, in the absence of sugar beets and alfalfa and coffee and even chicory, on roasted asparagus seed. They were on their doomed way to fight in Russia, where they’d end up sleeping in the steaming carcasses of disembowelled horses and bandaging their frightful wounds with paper ripped out of books from pillaged libraries (those urbane and foolish enough to stop to read bled to death but at least made their exits worthily occupied). * For every soldier who followed Napoleon to Russia, approximately one-sixth of a soldier returned, including the elite of the Dragoon, Chausseur, Polish Lancer, and Grenadier regiments of the Imperial Guard Cavalry. Here in Zwickau the civilians were victims of the very things that were killing the soldiers, except the townspeople were not being paid to die, and their survivors would receive no pensions, and the logic of death and therefore the meaning of life were absent: cannon balls, starvation, and typhus.
    Robert’s mother caught the typhus, which was carried by the waters of the lakes and rivers into which corpses of men and animals had fallen or been slipped for serous burial. So Robert, the baby in the family, was sent to live with the Ruppius family. There he remained for two and a half years.
    He returned home in that sunny period between Napoleon’s banishment to St. Helena in 1815 and the assassination in 1819 of the reactionary writer and spy for the Russians, August von Kotzebue. It was the latter that gave Metternich all the excuse he needed to begin censoring the press and oppressing all those demanding little university students who seemed to think that the only way to educate a mind was to open it first. The Emperor himself, Francis I, that veritable Justinian (whose closing of Athens’s schools of philosophy in 529 was to most rulers a touchstone